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Must I Memorize A Billion Phrases? | ||
Tags: Idiom | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5450 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 41 of 43 30 January 2010 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
you misunderstood my post. I don't know why you got the impression that I was talking about memorizing hace calor as isolated sentence...I was talking exactly about memorizing the rules (I just used one example for Spanish and English and then another one for English and Serbian. I thought it is enough to make it clear that I am talking about memorizing the rules :) ). so, to make my point clear: in the beginning, you have to memorize how is your target language using the words to express certain things and forget about literal translation from your first language (which, if I understood well, was the problem that topic starter was talking about). once you know language good enough ( and I guess this good enough point might be different for different people), this memorizing will become much, much easier... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5450 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 42 of 43 30 January 2010 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
I see now what you meant, sorry for misunderstanding :) from my experience with English, once you get to the point to start learning idiomatic phrases, your language is already good enough that learning from the context should be much easier than memorizing (and I explained already what I mean by memorizing). yes, some effort is needed, but I don't think you need to sit with a 5000 cards with idioms and do rote mem. :) i just think that there should be an easier way (and from my experience with English - there is). just one thing about this:
well, hace calor is literal for you, but for me, completely new in Spanish - it is far from literal :). for me literal would be Es calor, because that is the way it is in my first language...same for English I'm cold - it is literal for me now, but it wasn't in the very beginning. Back then, I had to memorize it as a rule and forget about literal translation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6089 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 43 of 43 30 January 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You need to listen to hundreds of hours of the language, to the point where you don't just fluently understand it, but to where you hear phrases and constructions repeated so much that you can tell what sounds natural and what doesn't.
Adult L2 learners forget just how much constant exposure they got as children. If we assume that a baby gets an average of around 2 hours of continuous, meaningful language input every day during his first 2 years of life, that's around 1500 hours! The only L2 learners who even come close to that are those who go abroad, and I think that's why after just a month in Russia, I can parse the spoken language at almost fluent level. You don't HAVE to go abroad for that, but you need to immerse yourself at home. Designate a few hours everyday to exclusively using and listening to your target language, and I think you'll see results relatively quickly. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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